Ron Price
Mr RonPrice
UNSUSPECTED BENEFITS
It is a stupendous paradox that a god does not only fail to protect his chosen people against its enemies but allows them to fail....yet is worshipped only the more ardently. This is unexampled in history and is only to be explained by the powerful prestige of a prophetic message.. -Max Weber, Ancient Judaism, The Free Press, Glencoe, 1952, p. 364.
It was the very instability and incoherence of Greek political institutions during the Mycenean and Dark Ages, 1600 to 800 BC, that led to a political evolution which was denied to other cultures. -Anthony Andrewes, Greek Society, Penguin, Melbourne, 1987, p.xxiii.
The process whereby its unsuspected benefits were to be manifested to the eyes of men was slow, painfully slow, and was characterized, as indeed the history of His Faith from its inception to the present day demonstrates, by a number of crises which at times threatened to arrest its unfoldment and blast all the hopes which its progress had engendered. -Shoghi Effendi, God Pases By, USA, 1957, p.111.
You came from the plains and the mountains
with nearby river civilizations to fertilise your soil.
Perhaps you went into Egypt back when
horse and chariot were first used in warfare1
and lived for half a millennium there.
Then your lands slipped out of Egyptian rule,
you left for Canaan and fought as an armed group
with the Philistines, Midianites,Moabites,
Ammonites, Aramaeans. And you fought
among yourselves in your tribal and family groups
until the United Monarchy under Saul, David
and Solomon(ca 1030-930 BC).
It had been a long journey.
Things fell apart again and tensions
with the nomadic Bedouins continued
a political and economic warfare.
Extended kinship groups and warriors
quibbled and quarrelled for land,
land has always been a problem.
Rural herdsmen and the settled,
urban population had sharp clashes
as did stock-breeders and peasants
in those lasting antagonisms.
Gradually agriculture replaced
peasantry, herdsmen and artisans.
Town life took the place of the country
and with the towns the urban landlords
and Kings replaced the power of chieftans.
It was not without a long struggle.
Under Solomon(971-932) this ancient
Jewish state began to take its part
on the world political stage
as a kind of oriental despotism
like Egypt with a central administration
and an all-powerful king.
For the next four hundred years(922-538)
Israel took part in a series
of political and military catastrophes
ending in the Babylonian captivity
and a diaspora--you’d get used to them.
During these long years
oracles of a classical prophecy
told of the terror of the Assyrians,
the time honoured ‘law’
of the confederate tribes,
the voice of doom, righteousness
and that distant utopian vision.
They made the moral precepts
of everyday life a duty
and the direction of society
intimately connected with a way of life
in a spirit on constant expectation
and the powerful prestige of a prophetic message.
And so it was that prophets, psalmists,
sages and priests inculcated the Torah
for generations, mostly without success
until the Judean theocratic state
in the fifth century BC
gave a definite direction to Jewish history
through that Torah.
A common, universal way of life emerged
in this Hebrew Commonwealth
as Greece emerged into its golden age
after its long and formative age,
for formative ages are long & tortuous.
Ron Price
26 July 1996
11800 BC
It is a stupendous paradox that a god does not only fail to protect his chosen people against its enemies but allows them to fail....yet is worshipped only the more ardently. This is unexampled in history and is only to be explained by the powerful prestige of a prophetic message.. -Max Weber, Ancient Judaism, The Free Press, Glencoe, 1952, p. 364.
It was the very instability and incoherence of Greek political institutions during the Mycenean and Dark Ages, 1600 to 800 BC, that led to a political evolution which was denied to other cultures. -Anthony Andrewes, Greek Society, Penguin, Melbourne, 1987, p.xxiii.
The process whereby its unsuspected benefits were to be manifested to the eyes of men was slow, painfully slow, and was characterized, as indeed the history of His Faith from its inception to the present day demonstrates, by a number of crises which at times threatened to arrest its unfoldment and blast all the hopes which its progress had engendered. -Shoghi Effendi, God Pases By, USA, 1957, p.111.
You came from the plains and the mountains
with nearby river civilizations to fertilise your soil.
Perhaps you went into Egypt back when
horse and chariot were first used in warfare1
and lived for half a millennium there.
Then your lands slipped out of Egyptian rule,
you left for Canaan and fought as an armed group
with the Philistines, Midianites,Moabites,
Ammonites, Aramaeans. And you fought
among yourselves in your tribal and family groups
until the United Monarchy under Saul, David
and Solomon(ca 1030-930 BC).
It had been a long journey.
Things fell apart again and tensions
with the nomadic Bedouins continued
a political and economic warfare.
Extended kinship groups and warriors
quibbled and quarrelled for land,
land has always been a problem.
Rural herdsmen and the settled,
urban population had sharp clashes
as did stock-breeders and peasants
in those lasting antagonisms.
Gradually agriculture replaced
peasantry, herdsmen and artisans.
Town life took the place of the country
and with the towns the urban landlords
and Kings replaced the power of chieftans.
It was not without a long struggle.
Under Solomon(971-932) this ancient
Jewish state began to take its part
on the world political stage
as a kind of oriental despotism
like Egypt with a central administration
and an all-powerful king.
For the next four hundred years(922-538)
Israel took part in a series
of political and military catastrophes
ending in the Babylonian captivity
and a diaspora--you’d get used to them.
During these long years
oracles of a classical prophecy
told of the terror of the Assyrians,
the time honoured ‘law’
of the confederate tribes,
the voice of doom, righteousness
and that distant utopian vision.
They made the moral precepts
of everyday life a duty
and the direction of society
intimately connected with a way of life
in a spirit on constant expectation
and the powerful prestige of a prophetic message.
And so it was that prophets, psalmists,
sages and priests inculcated the Torah
for generations, mostly without success
until the Judean theocratic state
in the fifth century BC
gave a definite direction to Jewish history
through that Torah.
A common, universal way of life emerged
in this Hebrew Commonwealth
as Greece emerged into its golden age
after its long and formative age,
for formative ages are long & tortuous.
Ron Price
26 July 1996
11800 BC
